The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Equal Cost Multipath routing (ECMP) is used to load balance packets being communicated across a network by allowing the traffic to use multiple paths. Packets of different flows are load balanced across multiple paths in a manner that packets of a same flow follow a same path. ECMP selects which path a particular packet will take by processing certain fields of the particular packet. These field(s) may include an entropy value.